Shades Within Us

Inkskinned-3

“Thirty seven,” I responded. This was not shame I was feeling; it was guilt. “The Spore killed every single one. And in the corner . . .” My throat tightened. “. . . two young girls.” The spasm hardened, and I could not speak. Julie reached out a hand, but I shook my head. I had to finish. “Their arms were wrapped around each other in their final moments.” I raised my head to meet Julia’s eyes. “They could have been my sisters.”

Julia closed her eyes, soaking my words in. “What did you do afterwards?”

“I stripped off my armour and weapons harness, tore away my clan’s warrior mark. I couldn’t wear it.” My legs had wobbled as I departed. I left my warrior-self behind me forever in that building. “If I’d taken my handgun with me, I would have stuck it in my mouth and pulled the trigger.” I exhaled loudly, closed my eyes. “That’s when they captured me.”

“Who?” Julia asked.

“A rogue group of humans,” I told her. “Not part of their armed forces. They dragged me to their underground base where no light shone, strapped me down to a bench and tortured me for months.” I peeled back my sleeves, showed her the marks where the metal restraints bit into my wrists and elbows. “I told them everything, but it did not stop the cutting, the slicing, the drilling. It didn’t stop them sawing off my antlers, from running electrapoles along my feet, or laughing as they burned my skin and made bets whether I’d pass out or beg for mercy first.” I folded my hands together. “They treated me like we had treated them.”

Julia was no longer breathing. We stared at each other; two species that should have despised each other. Instead we were sitting side by side. Sharing this space.

“I’ve . . . heard stories,” she said, her voice barely audible. “I never thought they’d be true.”

“When they had beaten me within an inch of my life, they hooked my body up to a machine that kept me alive, but just barely. They left me restrained in complete, sensory-deprived isolation for more than a year. It was a darkness so black I didn’t think I could ever see the sun again.”

This time, she let her hand rest on my shoulder.

My shoulders started shaking as the empty darkness filled my head again. No Kichi would show emotion like this, but I no longer cared. “These words stopped me from going mad. I recited all the books and texts and transcripts I’d read since I was a child. The knowledge that there was an outside world. That there was life and people who missed me.” I gestured to the scripts on my body. “This. Reminded me of the things we had done.” I breathed out, long and heavy. “It kept me alive.”

“Atlas . . .” Julia began, but I held up a hand.

“When the war was over and I was rescued, I knew I couldn’t stay in a society that had done these things. But I could not leave the words and scripts that saved me.” My hands were steadier as I touched the blue ink on my chest. “And I cannot leave them now.”

Julia was silent for the longest time.

Yells and grunts and smoke floated up from a few floors down. I thought she would leave. Instead she reached across, grabbing my rough, brown hands in both her smooth pale ones. Just holding them tightly. “I’m sorry, Atlas,” she whispered. “I’m so, so sorry.”

My hands folded into her’s, almost by instinct. I had told so few people this; never a human. But if I did not give her the chance to listen and to trust me, then I would not get trust in return. If this was to be my home, I would not run from my pain.

A series of expressions moulded and unmoulded across Julia’s features. Then, she said, “When I first applied to come to Khronos, there was a high demand for this exact job. Only you had to speak English to get it. I grew up in a country called Poland, where they don’t speak English.” Her fingers traced the burns and scars and scabs on my hands. “For six months, I spoke nothing but English. Not one word of my language. When I arrived here, I changed my name.”

“You had to fit in.”

She showed me something on her palmerlog. “But I never forgot where I came from.” Images of snow-capped mountain ranges that curved down to tall sprawling forests and rolling grasslands, dotted with what I recognized as elk. Her home. “And neither do you. You get as much chance as anyone else does to live here, Atlas. There will be a way for you to preserve your language.”

She smelled fresh. Eager and wanting to help and do good things.

“Jorren,” I said, mandibles clicking together. “Before I changed it, my name was Jorren.”

Julia blinked heavily. “Mine used to be Agnieszka,” she said, and then with a smile, “I’ve never told anyone here.”

I inclined my head toward hers. Was I betraying my people by enlisting the help of a human? If I was, then perhaps we needed to change.

Julia had a friend who worked as an archivist, mainly for material that had been at one point banned or deemed inappropriate. He was a measly man, no taller than the grassland shrubs of Ruste, who almost refused to help once he saw what was on my body. But Julia convinced him my glyphs were too important for a real archivist to turn down. Human pride is clearly as persuasive as Kichi’s.

On the way back to my apartment, I knew I was getting more stares than usual. Murmurs of spiky and bloodsucking aliens. People avoided me, stepping to the other side of the road. What had happened now?

And then the bomb exploded.

The sound rippled through the entire street. The shop that refused service to Kichi. It was gone, replaced by a cloud of dust and debris. The smell of charred, dead flesh smacked me in the face. My mandibles ground together as a chaos of milling people, all bleeding from their ears, swirled around me. Eight dead. None of them Kichi. The shop owner was slumped in a corner, his hands and feet charred, melted stumps. The tooth I’d given him was embedded in the centre of his forehead, where a clan marking would be. A message.

“We’re in for it now.” Nakatus appeared at my shoulder, rubbing his antlers.

“Do you smell that?” I wheezed out, my lungs bloating with a stench I did not want to remember ever again. Spore. “It’s him.”

When Nakatus didn’t respond I pulled him down an alley, where a series of gurgling pipes that recycled the asteroid’s oxygen masked our voices. “Chieftain Krung is doing this. You know it.”

Nakatus couldn’t meet my eye. “Krung sent messages out a few days ago. Tried to get us to help him plan an attack. I told him not to bother us again and we wouldn’t turn him in.”

I just stared at my friend. “You defended him? Are you mad?”

“I didn’t want to!” Nakatus couldn’t meet my eye. “If the humans catch a Kichi planning terror attacks, it’ll go badly for all of us. And . . .”

“And what?”

He did not say it, but our ingrained cultural loyalty meant we did not turn against our brothers, and we never turned against our clan or our family. It was not done.

I stepped back, disgusted with his gutlessness.

He caught my disdain and flashed a scowl at me. “What would you have done?”

I was caught. I opened my mouth, but had no words.

Krung was going to destroy my new home, the friends I was starting to make here. Julia could have been killed in that blast, as could an innocent Kichi. Krung wasn’t worth protecting. Not even if it went against my instincts.

I took a breath. “Stop him.” There. The words, out in the open, if whispered. I cleared my throat. “I’m going to stop Commander Krung.”

“You’re crazy.” Natakus shook his head. “You’re seriously thinking about doing this.”

I locked eyes with him, and he knew. He knew all the arguments, and that none of them would change my mind. I’m stubborn that way.

“All right,” he conceded. “You’re still crazy, but you’re my friend. The message came from this point.” He showed me a location in a palmerlog he’d probably stolen from the markets. I accepted his offer of a rheda roll and took one deep, dark drag before thanking him.

I was about to leave when he pushed something cold and hard into my hands.

A thingun. Something I never wanted to hold again.

I let my hands close over the cold metal, and we shared a long look. I knew where both our loyalties lay.

I smelled Krung before I saw him. It was the same musky smell of rust and metallic powder he’d had in the war. Only now the sulphuric stench of hate oozed from his pores, consuming the room around him. I closed the door behind me and slid the bolt into place. I couldn’t believe Krung had no followers, but no one had challenged my entrance.

“Jorren?” he coughed out. His antlers were long and proud, his face heavy with clan tattoos. He was clad in his armour. Gleaming rust-red and bronze, the chest plate polished and brandished with war cries. The same make of armour I’d worn in the war. He couldn’t have smuggled that through customs. He’d welded it here himself.

He’d been kneeling over a case of wired instruments, parts scattered over the floor of the apartment where he was holed up. He’d taken a room in an upper Khronos floor, away from the rest of us. He’d probably killed the owner for it. The walls and panellings that weren’t covered in holologs of schematics and blueprints were heavy with Kichi paraphernelia. Sculptures, art mural paintings of landscapes and artistic renderings of battlegrounds, Kichi weapons, assault rifles, nightoptics. He was not living on Khronos; he was still back on Ruste.

“What are you doing to yourself?” I asked, my voice filling the room. Krung’s mandibles locked tight as he realized I was not here to join his cause. I swung my arms out. “This is perverted.”

“This is what needs to happen, son.” Krung had been feeding his array of explosives into the coil of wires he’d stripped out of the walls. Timed detonations, all around Khronos. How long had the mad bastard been planning this? “Humans need to understand who is in control. They humiliated us. Now they’re trying to destroy our culture. Our words. Our art. Our memories.”

“Kichi culture is important, but it’s not worth killing for. Nothing is.”

He sat back on his heels, letting the wiring drop, his piercing expression judging me, my clothes, my posture, my amputated antlers. “They’ve stolen you, Jorren. They’ve sucked you into their soulless conglomerate and stripped out everything that made you the son of a Kichi clansman.” He turned back to his explosives. “They’d rather see us erased. This attack will let them know otherwise.”

“This will just divide us.” I inclined my head, a peace offering. “Assimilating with the Common doesn’t mean we must forget our origins.”

“But our children will!” His teeth gleamed in the faded blue light of the adlogs outside the window as his chest puffed. “They’ll become part of a people who despises them. A true Kichi would never live among his inferiors.” He stood. “Let alone stoop below them.”

“Better that we are able to live in peace and have children!” Julia. How she’d forsaken her history for the greater good. The shop owner who’d changed his mind about us. Evidence we could make this work.